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Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Free

“Good morning.”

The elderly woman at the counter didn’t glance up from her
romance novel.She never did, but Sam
greeted her every morning anyway.Shrugging,
she keyed in her membership code and turned up the long hallway to the locker
room.

The YMCA had made some effort to brighten up the gray little
area, so the lockers were now painted a variety of primary colors.Nothing could be done about the cinder block
walls, though.Or the damp, chemical
smell that united all locker rooms and made them familiar.

Sam trudged to the last row of lockers, closest to both the
swimming pool entrance and the showers.

“Good morning!”

Sam’s head jerked up in surprise at the chirped
greeting.A woman smiled at her from
halfway down the row of lockers.

“Good morning,” Sam responded, out of habit.She shuffled down to an empty locker and set
her bag down on the bench, keeping an eye on the interloper a few lockers down.

To her relief, the woman turned back to her open locker and
began to strip off her clothes with a casual confidence Sam couldn’t help but
admire.They were the same age, but the
skin-tight swim suit the other woman was pulling on slid over a body that didn’t
look like it had ever seen 110 pounds, never mind the 250 Sam admitted to.

Knowing it was stupid, she waited until the room was empty
to undress and struggle into her suit.Sam
pushed through the door to the pool, her towel carefully wrapped around her
bulk.

Sam winced and looked toward the water, where the woman had
already lowered her slender body into the cool water.As she and the lifeguard watched, the
stranger pushed off and began swimming toward the other end, awkwardly slapping
the water and lifting her head out of the water with every stroke.

“Hope I don’t have to pull her out,” the lifeguard
commented, grinning at Sam.“Don’t have
to worry about that with you!”

Sam grinned back, and dropped the towel to slide into the
welcoming arms of the water.Freed from
the gravity that made her bulk a graceless prison, she cut through the water cleanly,
propelling herself past the other woman with ease as she settled into the
smooth rhythm of her workout.

This post is my response to a prompt from Write On Edge - we were to write about freedom, in a way that makes sense to us, and keeping it to 400 words. For me, being in the water is more natural than walking on land. On land I'm clumsy, self-conscious, and hopelessly uncoordinated. In the water, I am free. I swam competitively for most of my childhood and teen years (although I switched to water polo in high school), and in the water is the one place where my body actually does what it's told.

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